The Sudan Slavery: Toward an Anthropology of News
Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim - Professor Emeritus of African History and Islam, University of Missouri-Columbia, U.S.A
In this paper, the crossing of the Atlantic is rather for the news of slavery traveling to America and Europe rather than the commodity, slaves, itself. This research on slavery in Sudan relies on a distinction James Reston of The New York Times made between the nature of news at their source and at the receiving end. He advised that news is only news at the receiving end, at their origins their substance pertains to the realm of sociology or ethnography. The paper reviews the literature written about the “return of slavery” to Sudan in 1987 revealing its inordinate focus on the news, whether real or fabricated, of the matter rather than its sociology or ethnography. The literature reviewed in the paper comprises Debora Scoggin’s dispatches to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the first to break the news of this slavery to the world, Gilbert Lewthwaite and Gregory Kane’s “Witness to Slavery” in The Baltimore Sun, Nicholas Kristoff’s digressions in the New York Tim Suliman Baldo and Ushari Ahmed Mahmud’s Dien Massacre and Slavery in Sudan (1987) the first work to reveal that return of slavery to the Sudan popularized as the work of two academicians, Jok Madut, Jok’s War and Slavery in the Sudan (2001) which is one of the rare books written by an anthropologist. The paper also investigates the work of a publicity-hungry Kola Boof, an allegedly American Sudanese and a former unwilling mistress of Usama Bin Laden, who interjected herself into the Sudan slavery narrative to sell her books. It will also examine the Christian Solidarity International “buying back” campaign to free child slaves in Sudan as a distinct episode in profiting from the news of Sudan slavery. De Waal’s “Exploiting Slavery in Sudan” (The New Left Review,1998) pioneered this critique of the disservice to the public at large visited by news divorced from their sociology.
Slavery, Race, Nationalism, and Labor in Qatar’s Oil Industry, 1940s-1960s
Ahmad Alawad Sikainga - Professor of African History, Ohio State University, U.S.A
In the broadest sense, this paper deals with the persistence of slavery and its legacy in the Persian Gulf. Its main goal is to illuminate the intersection of slavery, abolition, wage labor, class formation, and citizenship. At the specific level, however, the paper focuses on the impact of the oil industry on the practice of slavery in Qatar and the development of a labor system that included enslaved people, emancipated slaves, free-born workers, casual, and migrant workers. Since the early years of the oil industry, oil companies in the Persian Gulf mobilized workers from various social, national, and cultural backgrounds. This theme is the primary focus of this inquiry. Sikainga is particularly concerned with the question of how this heterogeneous group of free and unfree workers interacted with each other, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies to negotiate their working conditions and resist the policies of the oil companies. The presentation argues the use of race and national origin by the oil companies to differentiate between different groups of workers in terms of benefits and pay had a detrimental impact on the attitude of oil workers and the formation of working-class solidarities and alliances across ethnic, national, and cultural lines. On another level, the paper highlights the link between the oil industry and the abolition of slavery and the way in which oil wealth has shaped social relations, the emergence of social hierarchies, and the status of former slaves in Qatari society.
Attending to Race and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Muscat Thomas F. McDow - Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University, U.S.A
The essay uses microhistory to focus on questions of race and slavery in the Indian Ocean port city of Muscat in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Muscat, long an emporium of Indian Ocean trade and a gateway to the Gulf was the home of populations of Arabs, Indians, Baluchis, and Africans, among many others, and was also a site of overlapping systems of slavery. Enslaved men and women of diverse racial and geographical origins lived and worked in the city and its port. This paper uses the career of the boundary-crossing Indian polymath A.S.G. Jayakar to examine race and slavery in Muscat. Jayakar, a native of Bombay, arrived in Muscat as a doctor around the time that a stringent anti-slavery treaty was signed and lived in the capital area for twenty-five years, with increasing levels of responsibility within the British Residency. Jayakar moved between and among racial groups and social hierarchies, and he also encountered enslaved people in manifold settings: as his patients, as recent arrivals, as divers, as soldiers, as urban laborers, as pawns, and as supplicants seeking manumission.
4 сен 2023
